 Psalm 24, the earth is the Lord's and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters. Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully, he shall receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is Jacob, the generation of those who seek him, who seek your face. Lift up your heads, O you gates, and be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord might he in battle. Lift up your heads, O you gates, lift up you everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts. He is the King of glory. We've seen thus far I trust that worship is the ultimate priority and the most noble act of which any of us are capable. We saw that we are to worship God because he is God and because he both deserves and demands it, but it would be erroneous and a grave mistake indeed to think that God accepts our worship no matter what. It's extremely faulty thinking among Christians that worship consists in nothing more than showing up and keeping your eyes open for an entire hour and then leaving. Again, the essence of worship is not what is what you bring with you, not what you take with you. It's what you leave here, not what you leave with. It's not so much based on the length of the sermon, though the quality of the sermon is indeed an issue, but it is based on the nature and character of the God that you have come to worship that is the greater issue. We are to be more concerned with whether or not God was pleased with our worship than we are with whether or not we were pleased with the worship. Our worship will begin to change when we realize that worship is for God, not for us. Now, not everything we offer as worship qualifies as worship. There are prerequisites. There are things that God insists upon with regard to his own worship. And we must seriously consider what it is in a scripture sense to worship God. That's an important point. Worship isn't what we think it is. Worship is what God thinks it is. So we need to see what the word of God says about it. For example, in John 4, Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, and he confronts her about her promiscuous lifestyle. And she does exactly what most people do when they're confronted with sin. She changes the topic. You go to somebody and you witness and you tell them that Christ is the only way and you need to repent of your sin, and they'll say, why are there so many denominations? What? We weren't talking about that. Do you think the Pope's a Christian? I don't know. Are you? That's more the issue. She changes the topic in this case to a question about who has the right worship style. That wasn't a part of the conversation at all. And in John 4, Jesus tells her there is at least one element that is a must. They that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. As I said, the worship of Mount Garrison was emotion without truth. The worship of Jerusalem was truth without emotion. It's not one or the other. In fact, it should be both. That's the case with many things in Scripture. People want to make it. It's either this or it's either that. It's usually both of them and a few things we haven't even talked about yet. But it must always be emotion based on truth, not truth defined by and derived from emotion. Christianity is not exclusively a religion of the mind, nor is it exclusively a religion of the heart. But the heart's responses must be regulated by the truth that is first realized in the mind. If you remember when the two men walked with the resurrected Christ says their hearts were strangely warmed. Why? Because of the truth that Jesus was telling them. Truth always goes through the vestibule of the mind before it reaches the sanctuary of the heart. It is required by God that worship be done in truth and with the spirit. And again in John 4 Jesus says God is seeking worshipers, not just converts. We must also see here that God defines what acceptable worship is, not us. So the first point is God may refuse our worship. Just because you show up doesn't mean God considers it worship. Amos chapter 5 verses 21 to 24, God says, I hate, I reject your festivals nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer up to me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them. And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings. Take away from me the noise of your songs. I will not even listen to the sound of your hearts. In other words, he won't look at it. He won't listen to it and he won't smell the burning incense. In other words, sometimes during our worship, God closes his eyes, covers his ears and holds his nose. But even God be more graphic than that. It's not worth looking at. It's not worth watching. And it stinks. What made this worship unacceptable? Well, in that situation, there was a lack of justice and a lack of righteousness. Injustice and unrighteousness invalidated their offerings. My second point, there are two prerequisites to acceptable worship. First, worship is unacceptable to God when there's a broken relationship between two Christians. If you and another brother and sister in Christ are not getting along, you're wasting your time here, because nothing is happening. Matthew 5, 24, if you come to the altar to present your offering, and you remember that your brother has something against you. First, go and be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering. As we saw in the first session, there are a few things more important to God than his worship. But as important as that is to him, he places an even higher premium on right relationships between fellow Christians. We are first to be reconciled to our brother, and then we are to come and present our offering. And notice it didn't say you remember that you have something against someone else. It says you remember that someone has something against you. Now we are prone to say, hey, listen, if they got something to us, come, something against me, let them come to me. That's their problem, not mine. But God doesn't see it that way. In fact, if I can put it in a nice, neat little formula, the one who knows is the one who goes. If they remember it, they're to come to you. If you remember it, you're to go to them. And I guess ideally you'll meet halfway between your respective houses. But it's that important to God. And if there's no, if there's a breach between two Christians, there's no worship taking place anyway. How sad to think that there are some who, because they won't make things right with a Christian brother or sister, or because they've been holding a grudge against someone, they may not have worshiped God for years. They've been here every Sunday. They've got Sunday school pins down to the floor. They trip over them. They got a perfect attendance record. They haven't worshiped in 50 years. I have a friend in Chicago. His name is Bill. He is a man who taught me how to study the Bible inductively. And I was staying with him one time for a week. And Sunday morning came, Bill not only had his own ministry, but he was the assistant pastor at a Baptist church in the Chicago suburbs. And we were getting ready for church, and he and his older son, Peter, got into an argument. And they got pretty heated. And Bill is as meek and mild a guy as I've ever known in my life. I mean, if he got really, really upset, he might go nuts. So this was so out of character for him. So anyway, he says, we'll deal with this later, Peter. So we went to church and Bill was up on the platform. Peter was up in the balcony. And Bill got up and he said, I can't do this. He says, I sinned against my son. He says, not only can I not worship, I certainly can't lead you in worship until I've made this right. Peter, my son, I sinned against you this morning. I'm confessing that sin and I'm asking your forgiveness. Will you forgive me? What's Peter supposed to say? No, stick it in your ear, pop. I'm not. He's kind of in a no win situation there. But he says, yes, Father, I do. I forgive you. And then Bill wiped the tears from his eyes. That is humility in front of the whole congregation. But he understood that while that relationship was broken, he was absolutely an exercise in futility to try to do anything as part of the corporate body. If the apostle John can say, I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth. It's no stretch at all to think that God would say, I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in harmony. Based on that passage in Matthew five. I mean, how can we ask God to bless us when we can't bless each other? And do you see how this is inseparably related to what we read in Psalm 24? Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord and who may stand in his holy place? What's the answer? He who has clean hands and a pure heart. There can't be clean hands if you send against someone and haven't made it right. And you can't have a pure heart if you've got animosity or in between you and another Christian. You may not ascend into the hill of the Lord. You may not stand in his holy place if you don't have clean hands and a pure heart. If a person lived to be 70 years old and attended worship services every Sunday, this for one hour a week. So that from the day you were born until the day you died, you were in church every Sunday. And that would make you the exception rather than the rule. At the end of your life out of 70 years, you would have spent a grand total of five months of your life in the public worship of God. Now let's say you're a fanatic and you come back on Sunday night. If you attend a church, there's one of the few left in the world that has the Sunday night service. And if your church doesn't, I remind you it is the Lord's day, not the Lord's morning, not the Lord's hour. It's the Lord's day. And you went twice on Sunday for 70 years, you would have spent a grand total of 10 months out of 70 years in the public worship of God. And that would amount to a little over 1% of your life. And you'd be considered a fanatic. Now out of that five months, how much of that time was spent worshiping God as he commands with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind and all of our strength with clean hands and a pure heart giving unto the Lord the glory do unto his name. One of God's complaints in Malachi is that we keep giving God leftovers. What was happening was that he was saying sacrifice to me the spotless lamb. Wait a minute, that's spotless lamb pretty high up on the food chain. So what they were doing is they would go out and find a diseased lamb that was going to die anyway and they'd sacrifice that one to God. And he says, you're just giving me leftovers. How's that any different than us? We stay up late on Saturday night, we can barely keep our eyes open on Sunday, we give God leftovers. We spend money on things we want. If there's any left, we'll put some a couple bucks in the offering plate, we give God leftovers. That's supposed to be the first fruits, not the last fruits. God wants fruit, we give him broccoli, cauliflower. I'm with him. I won't eat anything that sounds like you're clearing your throat when you say the word. Bacca, yeah, cauliflower. When I was young and my dad was a cop, oftentimes he had to work the truck scales. This was a farming community, a lot of produce. We were the cantaloupe capital of the world. So we brought home a lot of cantaloupe. The truck weighed too much. Dad says, you can't go on the highway with that. You got too much weight. Well, here, take a crate of cantaloupes. All right, now you've made weight. But he also brought home a lot of other stuff. Broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, eggplant, lima beans. I didn't like any of that. Mom used to try to fool us. She'd smother it with velvita. That didn't work for me. Worship is unacceptable to God when there's a broken relationship between God, between man and another Christian. Secondly, worship is unacceptable to God when there's a broken relationship between God and man. I mean, if we can't worship God if we've offended our brother, how much less may we presume to worship God until first, by our genuine repentance, we've made our peace with him? If God will not accept our worship when there's a broken relationship between us and another Christian, how much less will he accept it if there's a broken relationship between us and him? Psalm 29, 2, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Now, there's a twofold meaning there. We're to worship God because of his holiness, and we are to worship God only when we too are holy or pure. In Isaiah chapter one, he says, wash yourselves, make yourselves clean. In that passage in Isaiah, God is calling the people Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sin, and he refers to their worship as trampling his courts. He calls their offerings worthless offerings and tells them to bring them no more. In fact, he says, I cannot endure sin and the solemn assembly. He says that when you pray, I'm going to hide my eyes. So what are the people to do? That's where God says, wash yourselves, make yourselves clean. Or as it says in Hebrews 10, draw near with the pure heart. Now, that being said, what's the unavoidable conclusion here? If we're unclean, we are not welcome to worship God. In fact, we're unable to worship God if that is the case. In the church I attend, which is very confessional and very liturgical, about one-third of the service into the liturgy, there's a place where the pastor prays, and then he says, please take a moment to confess your sins silently to the Lord. Now, confession of sin is always a good thing to do. And by the way, I have already brought this point up to the leadership of the church, so it's not like I'm talking behind their backs. But if we cannot worship God with unconfessed sin in our hearts, then one-third of that worship service has been a complete waste of time. If you didn't confess your sin until a third of the way through the worship service, the scripture reading, the prayer, the hymn singing, whatever you did before, that's absolutely wasted. If the people have sinned, they haven't confessed, no worship has taken place at all. If they're going to do that, it should open the service. Psalm 26 verse 6, I will wash my hands in innocence, so I will compass thine altar, O Lord. In other words, we're not even to come to the altar unless we've made ourselves a sentence. The psalmist is alluding to that custom of the priest who was enjoying under the law to wash his hands and feet when he went into the service of the tabernacle. And this was an example to the people then and to teach us now to teach us with what preparation we should approach God. So just generally speaking, we must deal with all sin before God will accept our worship. But you might ask, well, why will God not accept our worship just because we're not getting along with someone in the church? It's because he's commanded us to care for our brother. And how can we care for him if we aren't getting along with him? Now, the apostle Paul is also helpful here because he says, do what lies within you to be at peace with all men. He leaves the open the idea that not everybody in this world is as easy to get along with as you are. There's only so much you can do. You might go to your brother and say, I've obviously offended you. What can I do to make it right? You've jerked or anything you can do to make it right. I don't want anything to do with you. You've done everything you could do. He hasn't done everything. But now it's on him. It's not on you. You can go back and worship because you have gone to your brother and sought to make it right. If they don't cooperate, now all the sin is there is not 50 percent of it. Thomas Manton was a great Puritan. He said, when you live and hate for to your brother, you cannot offer any acceptable sacrifice to God. It is a sin that is contrary to the evangelical temper as well as the evangelical state. It is contrary to the meekness, patience, love and forgiving one another, that peaceableness and love which are so frequently and expressly required of Christians. For Christianity is the art of loving God and His people. Love is the chief duty we owe to both God and our neighbor. Next to our love to our Lord Jesus Christ, love to His people ought to be studied above all other things. If we are not in fellowship with our brother, we cannot appeal to the love of God with any confidence. According to 1 Peter 3.7, it spoils our access to God. Until you get rid of this distemper, a man is strangely blinded and perverted in the course of his walking, and all Christian practice is obstructed. Then do any good to go out and evangelize, then do any good to teach a class, then do any good to come here on Sunday morning and act like me and Jesus got a good thing going. I hope the phone lines are lit up tonight. As you take this teaching of the Bible seriously and make sure there's nothing you need to do to be at peace with the body of Christ. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, these are hard things, but then what of your teaching isn't? We ask that you would drive these truths home to us, convince us of the importance of them and our obligation to obey them immediately.